Fig. 3.

qRT-PCR validated expression profile of selected genes in different categories of COVID-19 cohort. a) qRT-PCR was performed on RNA isolated from COVID-19 patients for 14 genes and average log₂FC values (with respect to Negative Asymptomatic group) of PCR triplicates are shown in a heatmap. Each column represents a patient. The bottom annotation shows the C_t value for the viral gene encoding Envelope (E) protein with a corresponding legend on the top. Black boxes denote 'value unknown/undetermined'. b) Differences between groups for each gene were computed and the log₁₀ (p-value) of comparisons is shown in the heatmap. The comparisons are Negative asymptomatic vs Positive symptomatic (NA-PS), Negative symptomatic vs Positive symptomatic (NS-PS), and Positive asymptomatic vs Positive symptomatic (PA-PS). *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01; ***P < 0.001; ****P < 0.0001; ns – not significant (Kruskal-Wallis test followed by post hoc Dunn's test with Bonferroni corrections for multiple comparisons). c) log₂FC values are grouped based on age groups 30-40, 41-50, and 51-60. Each row represents the average of log₂FC values for patients falling into the particular age group and respective disease status. d) log₂FC values are grouped according to sex. Each row represents the average of log₂FC values for patients falling into the particular sex and respective disease status.